Gorbachev Turns 90

Today, first and only President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev celebrated his 90th birthday.

It was under him that the world learned such words as "perestroika" and "glasnost" and "new thinking". He went from rural hinterland to the highest echelons of power, received the Nobel Peace Prize and is remembered as one of the youngest general secretaries in Soviet history. Gorbachev is called a global reformer and politician who knew how to talk to people beyond a piece of paper, who knows how to inspire and surprise with his openness.

Shortly before his birthday, in a short interview with Interfax, he called on the current US President Biden, whom he met when he was still a senator, to sit down at the negotiating table with Putin and discuss the threat of nuclear war. Indeed, back in 1987 it was Gorbachev, then the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, who signed the Treaty on the Elimination of Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Missiles with Ronald Reagan. Then everyone smiled when they heard the phrase of the American president, said in Russian "trust, but verify." Gorbachev trusted. The United States liked our country as trusting and naive as it was then.

What would he "correct" Gorbachev always refused to say. Without explaining the reasons, but knowing full well that abroad he is respected more than at home. There was "detente" and the Berlin Wall, which divided Germany, destroyed with his direct participation. The withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan and the Nobel Peace Prize.

Here, in his homeland, the failed "anti-alcohol campaign", the Chernobyl accident, queues, empty counters and, finally, a week before the final collapse of the USSR in December 1991, even bread cards in Moscow. Everything was then a wonder. Even the constant appearance of his wife, Raisa Maksimovna, next to him, was outlandish for the Soviet people. Hence the rumors of those years that the main politician in the country was her, not him. Only after many years, when Gorbachev is left alone, everyone will understand that it was love. And nothing more. The euphoria from "perestroika", however, passed quickly, and he himself understood that the reforms he had started were half-hearted. He stood his ground to the last. But, after the Emergency Committee, in 1991, the country did not follow Gorbachev. The Belovezha Accords put an end to the history of the USSR, and he, the man who, in fact, turned the world upside down, resigned 30 years ago. This is another round date in 2021, like the 90th anniversary of Mikhail Gorbachev, the first and last President of the Soviet Union.